Quotes from Peter Singer

Yet causing imperceptible harm at a distance by the release of waste gases is a completely new form of harm, and so we lack any kind of instinctive inhibitions or emotional response against causing it. We have trouble seeing it as harm at all.

If a flock of chickens is without water on a hot day, and all you have to do to prevent them from dying slowly and painfully is turn on a tap, you ought to turn it on. If to do so you have to walk a few extra steps in shoes that pinch your little toe, you ought to walk those few extra steps.

The question cannot be dealt with by invoking the simplistic formula: 'The end never justifies the means.' For all but the strictest adherent of an ethic of rules, the end sometimes does justify the means. Most people think that lying is wrong, other things being equal, yet consider it right to lie in order to avoid causing unnecessary offence or embarrassment Ã¢â'¬â€œ

The question cannot be dealt with by invoking the simplistic formula: 'The end never justifies the means.' For all but the strictest adherent of an ethic of rules, the end sometimes does justify the means. Most people think that lying is wrong, other things being equal, yet consider it right to lie in order to avoid causing unnecessary offence or embarrassment.

When history looks back, do you want to be counted among the oppressors? Or among the liberators? You've got to make that choice.

It is on this basis that the case against racism and the case against sexism must both ultimately rest; and it is in accordance with this principle that the attitude that we may call "speciesism," by analogy with racism, must also be condemned.

they took this as a law of nature, a self-evident necessary truth. On the contrary, says Marx, it bears the stamp of a society 'in which the process of production has the mastery over man, instead of being controlled by him'.

We have an obligation to help those in absolute poverty that is no less strong than our obligation to rescue a drowning child from a pond.

The moral unity to be expected in different ages is not a unity of standard, or of acts, but a unity of tendency. . . . At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world. —W. E. H. LECKY, The History of European Morals

I hope that anyone was has read this far will recognize the moral necessity of refusing to buy or eat the flesh or other products of animals who have been reared in modern factory farm conditions. This is the clearest case of all, the absolute minimum that anyone with the capacity to look beyond considerations of narrow self-interest should be able to accept.

If your belief in equal rights and opportunities for all – and against racism, sexism and other kinds of discrimination – is based on there being no biological differences between people, then you'll find it very hard to know what to do if clear evidence of biological differences actually appears.

To explain our conventional ethical attitudes, is not to justify them.

For all I know, war is "natural" to human beings—it certainly seems to have been a preoccupation for many societies, in very different circumstances, over a long period of history—but I have no intention of going to war to make sure that I act in accordance with nature.

If it is justifiable to assume that other human beings feel pain as we do, is there any reason why similar inference should be unjustifiable in the case of other animals?

she was asked why she was sending convoys to distant countries when there were Poles so poor that they had to rummage through the garbage to find something to eat. Ochojska's reply was to reject the idea that caring for people far away is in conflict with caring for people nearby; she believes that making people aware of the needs of others anywhere in the world will make them more aware of the needs of local people as well.

I couldn't care less about politics, the culture wars. My only interest is to get people to care about Darfurs and Rwandas.

I agree with Varner and Scruton that the more one thinks of one's life as a story that has chapters still to be written, and the more one hopes for achievements yet to come, the more one has to lose by being killed. For this reason, when there is an irreconcilable conflict between the basic survival needs of animals and of normal humans, it is not speciesist to give priority to the lives of those with a biographical sense of their life and a stronger orientation towards the future.

As this chapter has shown, we are in the midst of an emergency in which appalling suffering is being inflicted on millions of animals for purposes that on any impartial view are obviously inadequate to justify the suffering.

They talk about this thing in the head; what do they call it? ["Intellect," whispered someone nearby.] That's it. What's that got to do with women's rights or Negroes' rights? If my cup won't hold but a pint and yours holds a quart, wouldn't you be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?3

The United States government continues to pour billions of dollars into research on cancer, while it also subsidizes the tobacco industry. Much of the research money goes toward animal experiments, many of them only remotely connected with fighting cancer—experimenters have been known to relabel their work "cancer research" when they found they could get more money for it that way than under some other label.

There is a view in some philosophical circles that anything that can be understood by people who have not studied philosophy is not profound enough to be worth saying. To the contrary, I suspect that whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either.

the misery and pain inflicted on animals that I described in the original 1975 edition of this book has not ceased.

What is it to make a moral judgement, or to argue about an ethical issue, or to live according to ethical standards? How do moral judgements differ from other practical judgements? Why do we regard a woman's decision to have an abortion as raising an ethical issue, but not her decision to change her job? What is the difference between a person who lives by ethical standards and one who doesn't?

Pro Life' or 'Right to Life' movement is misnamed. Those who protest against abortion but dine regularly on the bodies of chickens, pigs and calves can hardly claim to have concern for 'life' as such. Their concern about embryos and fetuses suggests only a biased concern for the lives of members of our own species.